Law firm develops in-house system to deal with discovery requests

Computerworld - The lawyers at Fenwick & West LLP had to sort through more than 100 million files for a client facing litigation. The firm sought outside providers to handle the discovery, but the client was put off by the estimated multimillion-dollar cost.

"They asked us to find another way," says Chief Technology Officer Matt Kesner.

Kesner's team came up with a solution: a proprietary in-house process called FIND, for File Identification Narrowed by Definition, which culls through data to identify pertinent pieces of information that lawyers can then review.

Since that initial innovation about five years ago, Kesner's IT department has refined the process, making the technology-driven service an important part of what it offers to the firm's lawyers as well as their clients.

"It is a great thing for firms to be doing, because it's just not possible to do this kind of work anymore without using software," says Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The computer forensics investigation project at Fenwick & West started with IT workers scrambling to develop the expertise to handle that initial case, according to Kesner.

That meant taking the firm's most talented IT people and letting them loose on the problem. Kesner says he had to learn to harness particular talents at particular times, bringing in the most creative people in the early stages and later rotating in workers more skilled in process and project management.

Matt Kesner

Kesner suggests that IT workers need to speak "in the same language as the business leaders on risk, both positive and negative, so you and they are on the same footing, so everyone understands the potential upside."

Trial and Error

Brad Bonnington, Fenwick & West's practice support and database manager, says the IT team experimented to figure out what off-the-shelf products offered, what they didn't offer and how the IT team would compensate for gaps.

"It was a lot of everything: trial and error, research and development, and knowing what you want out of it," IT Director Kevin Moore says, adding that the IT department learned to consider unsuccessful trials as the cost of doing business.

Fenwick & West's IT department also relied on a traditional test-and-verify approach to build and guarantee the accuracy of FIND.

Today, the process uses more than 75 software tools, most of them off-the-shelf applications without a lot of customization. Kesner says most of them fall into several categories: search-and-retrieval tools, spam filters, search technology, and forensic systems. Kesner's team used a combination of commercial products and open-source software to come up with this tool set.